£76k for executive after boss says ‘women should stay at home and cook’
A FINANCE executive has won £76,510 in compensation after being told by her boss: ‘Women should stay at home and cook.’
Lana Sinelnikova had accused Alex Pusco of sex discrimination and blew the whistle on alleged improper financial practices at ActivTrades, the foreign exchange company he founded.
The 37-year- old employee, who earned more than £100,000 a year, claimed he told staff ‘sex sells’ while showing a ‘degrading’ picture of a scantily-clad woman posing with a car. Miss Sinelnikova was suspended as head of compliance for gross misconduct after taking a work trip to Dubai while she was off sick with senior colleague Jon Friend, who was also her partner, a tribunal heard.
But the panel concluded that the City firm wanted to force her out and used the trip as ‘leverage’ to fire her. When she complained about her treatment, the London company – which has offices in the Bahamas, Italy and Bulgaria – embarked on a campaign of ‘concerted and malicious action’.
This included giving false information about her to the Financial Conduct Authority, wrongly claiming she had committed a criminal offence and threatening to take her to court. After she resigned in February 2018, ActivTrades – which made £11million profit that year – refused to return personal data from her work computer, including details of her divorce. It also accused her of using her work computer improperly to run an eBay trading account and storing illegal music files on her PC.
Both accusations were found to be baseless by the panel.
The hearing, in east London, found the firm guilty of victimising Miss Sinelnikova after she accused it of sex discrimination and blew the whistle on what she believed were potentially criminal practices.
In her complaint, she recalled an incident at the firm’s Bulgarian office when ‘Mr Pusco stated that “women should stay at home and cook”, in the context of complaining about the length of maternity leave in Bulgaria’.
Finding the firm guilty of unfair dismissal and victimisation, it said ActivTrades had ‘gone out of its way... to try to irreparably damage her career’. It said the company had caused ‘a very high level of injury to her feelings’ and its actions had ‘a profound effect on almost every aspect of her life’.
Miss Sinelnikova’s £76,510 compensation payout includes £40,000 damages for injury to her feelings. ActivTrades must also pay £5,000 – the maximum penalty available – for repeated breaches of employment law.